


Sailing into Disaster

by MrProphet



Category: Firefly, King Kong (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 16:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10700700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Sailing into Disaster

Zoe found the captain on the bridge. “Captain, this whole thing’s boo-tai jung-tzahng-duh.”

Mal shrugged. “Since when did we ever do the smart thing?” he asked, never taking his gaze from the scopes.

“Shepherd’s got a tale you need to hear,” she pressed.

“Don’t much like to leave the bridge right now. Gas cloud like this needs a weather eye.”

“I’ll get that,” Zoe promised. “You  _need_  to hear this. I promise to keep my eyes on the scope, not on my husband.”

“Not you I’m worried about.”

“We’re flying through a cloud of ionised gas with visibility something less than the time it takes to think about stopping this lovely hunk of metal, with several billion tonnes of asteroid floating around in it,” Wash pointed out. “Even I can manage to stay on task with that incentive.”

Mal left them on the deck and went down to the common area, where his passengers were making themselves at home and checking their recording equipment. Shepherd Book was standing at the far door, while Jayne and Kaylee were in the kitchen.

Jayne leaned across the bar and called out: “Hey, Shepherd! What would you say if someone told you this ship was headed for Xiang-hai?”

“I’d say they were full of it, Mr Cobb,” Book replied. "Were I not above such language."

Denham, the leader of the passengers – the one with the money – stood up. “Please,” he said. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“No,” Kaylee said softly. “You’re looking for something else.”

“Yes we are,” Denham admitted. “We’re going to find the Golgothan cluster. Find it, film it; wave it to the Cortex on pay per view.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Book said softly.

“What do you mean?” It was Denham’s assistant, a nervous young man, who spoke.

“Back before I went into the abbey, I was working my passage on a Firefly; a lot like this one,” the Shepherd explained. “Thirty days out from Osiris we picked up a castaway, drifting in a lifeboat. His ship had run aground on a planetoid, hidden in a cloud of nebular gases. He spoke of a huge barrier in space; built so long ago that it was there when the first settler ships arrived from Earth-that-was. A barrier as strong today as it had been a when it was built.”

Denham’s assistant swallowed hard. “Why did they build the wall?”

“The castaway spoke of a creature, neither beast nor man,” Book said. “Something monstrous living within that barrier.”

Denham laughed it off. “An alien?” he scoffed.

“Well, we would have asked for more details, but the next morning we found that he’d stepped out of the airlock.”

“Sorry fellas; you’ll have to do better than that,” Denham chuckled. “Aliens belong in lowband Cortex flicks. We’re making a serious wave.”

“Folks don’ t go way out into the black and build a wall in space for nothin’,” Jayne growled.

“If you go there. If you put down in the Golgotha cluster. You won’t come back,” Book assured them.

“Not that that bothers us much,” Jayne allowed, “but if you get one of the shuttles stuck down there, we gotta come get it or the captain takes it out of our cut.”

At that moment, the ship shifted violently to one side, turning hard enough to upset the equilibrium of the artificial gravity. A moment later there was a low, grinding squeal as the hull scraped along something hard and unyielding.

Mal stumbled to the bridge. “What in Hell are you two doing to my ship?” he demanded.

“Um… Wall,” Wash replied. With a supreme effort, he brought the ship back under control, stabilised her rotation and gently backed her off from the wall of metal which stretched as far as the eye could see, filling  _Serenity_ ’s viewport.

“Wow,” Mal breathed. “That is big.”

“Scope runs out before it does,” Zoe agreed. “It’s got a curve on its though; could be a part of a sphere… No; got an edge.”

“Ringworld.”

Mal looked around. River was standing in the doorway, staring at the steel wall. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Ringworld; solid ring constructed around a star. Habitable, on the inside.” She looked at him. “It’s bad,” she said. “We should go. Now. Before there’s screaming.”


End file.
